Dogma is a new dance theatre solo investigating the persuasive body and word. Politicians, advertisers, self-help gurus, religious leaders, trial lawyers – how do they persuade? How do they use words, gesture, and action to cultivate desire? What do they give us, and what do we want from them?
Partly inspired by the recent American presidential campaign, Dogma looks at how messages are delivered, boxed, and sold. It deconstructs rhetorical and physical styles of oration (sourcing from ad campaigns, litigators, philosophers, and tyrants), researching how the image, word, and body interface to sell an idea.
Dogma significantly builds upon and expands on some of Daria previous works, namely Product (2013) and Idoru (2010). Both those pieces explored the nature of advertising and marketing, and specifically, the way women’s bodies are used to sell products – how our bodies are consumed and used to encourage consumption. Indeed, the female form and its many selling points will be explored in this new work, but I want to expand the scale beyond gender, into the underlying tenets of persuasive communication, and how this relates to live performance.